T-shirt #28: Batgirl (spoiler alerts)

T-shirt #28: Batgirl: Television, paralysis, and transgender

I dedicate today's entry to Batgirl, even though I am told that today is Superman's 75th birthday. But The Man of Steel will have to wait until I can find my Superman shirt. The T-shirt blog is starting to have a back-logged schedule.

This blog (the entire blog, not just today's entry) traces my life in popular culture: my life in geek. No such tracing could be complete without properly canonizing in a central position the influence of the Batman television show that ran on ABC from 1966 to 1968. And no discussion of how the Batman show influenced me could be complete without acknowledging Catwoman (we will deal with her a different day) and BATGIRL. (Also, always consult the super awesome DC Wiki.)

Batgirl serves as an example of how television produced media influence the comic books and how comic books depictions of heroes or the nature of the actual heroes (identity, personality, character) themselves will be altered to match (at least somewhat) television or film interpretations. Barbara Gordon as Batgirl was the brainchild of comics genius Julius Schwartz (previously mentioned in T-shirt #20, the Flash Logo) and the producers of the TV series in an attempt to boost ratings. By introducing Batgirl to the current comic books, the TV producers hoped to boost ratings by then introducing her to the TV show. PURIST ALERT!

Betty Kane? Yeah, okay, okay, I know. Comic book purists will cite that there was already a Batgirl character, Betty Kane, introduced by Bill Finger and Sheldon Moldoff in 1961 (before I was born), not counting Bob Kane's pesky girl version of Robin in the 1950s. But that was a one shot, and the real, true creation of the beloved Batgirl character came with this plan to boost ratings for the TV show, and the amazing Barbara Gordon.

In 1967, Gardner Fox and Carmine Infantino (also mentioned in the previous T-shirt #20, the Flash Logo entry) featured the new Batgirl in Detective Comics #359. In the story, Barbara Gordon, the daughter of police commissioner Jim Gordon, dresses as a female version of Batman for a costume ball. Inevitably, Batgirl comes to the aid of Bruce Wayne, saving him from being kidnapped by Killer Moth. The TV show producers made a short featuring the same basic story and ABC renewed the TV show for a third season, its last. Yvonne Craig played Batgirl in the TV show. Though Craig showed up in many TV shows throughout the 1960s and 1970s, such as Star Trek , she is best known for this role (with a dear place in my heart and the hearts of many Batman TV show fans). The TV show informed my ideas about justice, fair play, and heroism (though also a campy sense of fun) as a very young boy (ages 4-6) and the reruns that followed for a few years. With only two female roles on the show (not counting Aunt Harriet), both Batgirl and Catwoman influenced my ideas about women. Don't worry. I am not going to engage in any deep psycho-analysis here today. I will leave off with that last statement.

From those early days of the TV show, Batgirl became one of my favorite comic book characters along with her main ally: the original Robin (Dick Grayson). My life as a huge Teen Titans fan (even though Batgirl was never one of the Teen Tiatns) and fan of Robin and Batgirl will wait for another day as well. Suffice to say that I read apearances of Batgirl avidly until 1988 and Alan Moore and Brian Bolland's The Killing Joke. My world as a comic book reader and Batgirl fan was rocked when the Joker shot Barbara Gordon, quite unaware that he was also shooting Batgirl. The bullet to her spinal cord paralyzed her. (SIDENOTE: Criticism of this story and others in comics became known as "Women in Refrigerators," for which there many great web sources, though I cannot find my favorite from the iconic BITCH MAGAZINE.) Though other characters assumed the mantle of Batgirl in the intervening years, I remained a staunchly loyal fan of Barbara Gordon, who became Oracle and leader of the Birds of Prey from her wheelchair.

For many years, this new role of Barbara Gordon's seemed permanent, much like the death of Barry Allen as the Flash. But the comic book companies will do most anything to increase sales, and I can appreciate that fact of the industry. Though purists might cry foul at Barbara Gordon's miraculous recovery and resuming of the Batgirl mantle for DC's latest reboot 52, I was rather excited to have Barbara Gordon back in the cowl and new stories about one of my favorite comic book characters.

SPOILER ALERT FOR THE CURRENT BATGIRL COMIC (Batgirl #19).


















Though I had not read the issue yet, my wife told me the other day that Batgirl's roommate was going to come out as the first transgender woman in the history of comic books. DC is definitely breaking more ground in regards to LGBTQ issues with new gay characters, such as the original Green Lantern, Alan Scott, in Earth Two; various characters in Legion of Superheroes, whom fans have always argued were gay, such as Lightning Lass, Shrinking Violet, and Element Lad; and Batwoman. Now, Batgirl's roommate Alysia Yeoh reveals that she is trans. Writer Gail Simons handles the scene deftly as Barbara Gordon tells her roommate to call her "Babs" because "people I love call me 'Babs.'" Good articles about it have appeared on Art Threat and The Hufflington Post.



The new issues of Batgirl (through #19 as of last week) have been worth the twenty-four year wait to have Barbara Gordon back in the cowl.

GO BATGIRL!

- chris tower - 1304.18 - 9:54
Photo courtesy of Liesel MK Tower

T-shirt #27: The Iron Fist: would you like to live in a hidden city?

T-shirt #27: The Iron Fist: would you like to live in a hidden city?

The Iron Fist debuted in Marvel Premiere in 1974 as the creation of two of my favorite comic creators: Roy Thomas (Avengers, Conan as already mentioned in T-shirt # 21) and Gil Kane, one of my top five all-time favorite comic artists, a list including George Perez, Alex Ross, Jack Kirby, and John Romita. Cashing in on a martial arts craze sweeping the nation in the Seventies, Marvel introduced Kung Fu heroes, including Iron Fist and Shang-Chi. Though Shang-Chi is also one of my favorite characters, the Iron Fist was infinitely cooler with a dragon tattoo on his chest, a bright costume with the flared collar, and his namesake, the power to generate the first of iron, which smoldered like molten metal.

From the age of nine, the Iron Fist, Daniel Rand, grew up in a hidden city in the mountains of Tibet known as K'un-L'un. The city only appears on earth every ten years. Daniel learns martial arts there after both of his parents were killed during a journey to the mystical city.

The idea of a hidden city is one of the great archetypes in mythology. It was a very attractive idea to a young boy who was bullied every day in school. Not only was it a great escape from the abuse of bullies, but it was a place to learn to defend one's self against the bullies.

Apparently, I am not the only one who sought refuge from bullies in comics. In the latest issue of Wolverine (it's latest incarnation issue #2, writer Paul Cornell states that "the Claremont/Smith run of X-MEN was all that made me able to face school the next day [as a severely bullied child]." Though Wolverine and the X-Men are not the same as the Iron Fist (and those issues Cornell cites were published in the early 1980s ten years after the Iron Fist issues), the concept is the same: comics provide a means to escape the bullies.

The Iron Fist has seen many incarnations since his origins in the early 1970s. Iron Fist teamed with Power Man (Luke Cage) for many years as Heroes for Hire. But some of the best work has been done recently in Iron Fist vol. 4 in 2004 by Jim Mullaney (famous action writer on the DESTROYER series) and drawn by Kevin Lau. Though that series was good, the real definitive recent work was done by Ed Brubaker, Matt Fraction, and David Aja on The Immortal Iron Fist starting in 2007. This series was superb.

More 1970s nostalgia to come, because that's obviously a seminal period for me, but for now, I am thinking of that hidden city, nestled in the mountains of Tibet that only appears on earth once every ten years. At times like this with bombings and wars and militarism and poor economies, it sounds like a great place to go.

-chris tower 1304.17
Photo courtesy of Liesel MK Tower

PS: This T-shirt was a gift from my parents for my birthday in 2012.

T-shirt #26: Science is the new rock 'n roll

T-shirt #26: Science is the new rock 'n roll

Did anyone else go through a period of insanity during adolescence or was it just me?

Puberty seemed to obliterate parts of my personality like a disintegrating ray. I forgot about so many things I loved during my adolescence, like Baseball, Mad magazine, the piano, comic books (really! to some extent), and SCIENCE.

I love science. I really do.

I wish I had studied science in college. Right now, I would love to be a doctor of cognitive science or theoretical physics. But for some reason I chose English (creative writing) and Theatre.

I know I fancied becoming a filmmaker, and since my school did not offer film studies, I studied theatre with an emphasis in film.

Had someone clocked me hard upside the head to get my attention and rattle my brains, urging me
to choose something more practical and more fitting with my interests before puberty blasted a cloud of nonsense into my mind, I might now be working on intersections of artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, robotics, and nanotechnology at Google Labs.

So there's some regret. But not too much. Because what's the point of regret. Too much regret and one wallows in the past, stuck in the tar pit of the paleolithic. This is not for me.

I saw an interview once with Bruce Springsteen in which he said something that had a profound impact on me. I do not remember the exact quote, but in essence, he said: "I spent my whole life waiting to become the man I wanted to be, to live the life I wanted to have, until I realized that I needed to live the life I had, be the man I was."

Simple idea, and yet, I had not really considered it in those terms.

So, I am living the dream. I love my life. I feel like I have won the lottery. I am lucky. I am blessed. And though I may not become a futurist prognosticator with PhDs in cognitive perspective and molecular biology, I am in school studying computer science and using this blog as a daily warm-up exercise to writing a novel (actually, several novel projects).

And, in the words of the great David Bowie, "I could make it all worthwhile as a rock & roll star."

Science.

Science is the new rock 'n roll.

-chris tower 1304.16 12:19

PS: This is also probably a good time to plug my tumblr. Mostly I post science articles that may help me in my writing.

The gmrstudios repository of doubt

PPS: Updated 1306.08 - I should have mentioned when I wrote this entry that the shirt promotes a comic from Image Comics called Nowhere Men. But since I am not reading the comic, I did not think to mention it. You can read the five things Craveonline loves about the comic here.

T-shirt #25: "Yes, We Cannibal"

T-shirt #25: "Yes, We Cannibal"

In my continuing series encouraging everyone to have a sense of humor, I present a clever take on Obama's "Yes, We Can" slogan from his 2008 presidential campaign.

Like many of my shirts, I buy them via the monthly Previews catalogue that I use to order my comic books from Kalamazoo's nirvana of comics: Fanfare Sports and Entertainment. Much like T-shirt #14: Occupy Sesame Street, when I spotted this shirt, I had to have it. It furthers my call to the world at large to "Lighten Up," which is advice that I try to take to heart all the time.

I hope you find it amusing, especially on this wonderful day: TAX DAY.

The analogy created by the shirt's slogan and choosing it for TAX DAY should not be lost on anyone.

To close (because this is another short entry), I want to use a quote from one of my favorite poets, Herb Scott, former professor at WMU (Herb died a few years ago, and he is missed). This quote comes from "Butcher's Dream," one of the poems in his book "Groceries."

"I always wondered, "what is the tenderest part of the human carcass?"
Then I seen some cannibal say "the palm of the hand."
A delicacy you can't find in another game.
He'd kill for the human hand.
How do you figure?
Not even a meal.
But it makes you wonder.
It makes you stare at your own hand, like a strange animal."

Okay, did I just diffuse the whole "lighten up" and "sense of humor" thing?

Off to finish my taxes...

- chris tower 1304.15 6:53
Photo courtesy of Liesel MK Tower

T-shirt#24: My Sunday Best: Cerebus

T-shirt #24: Cerebus: "He doesn't love you; he just wants all your money."

I have been saving this shirt for a Sunday, especially since I spend a lot of my time discussing the Catholic Church with my wife the recovering Catholic.

This is a shirt featuring Cerebus, the aardvark, the most famous, non-mainstream comic and comic creation in all of comic book history. The first and best real "independent" and "alternative" comic published by Dave Sim's Aardvark-Vanaheim company from 1977 to 2004.

Over the years, I have spent a lot of time in the Cerebus universe. However, because of a lack of issues in the places where I was buying comics in 1977 (no direct sales specialty shops), I did not jump on the Cerebus bandwagon until late in the High Society run of the comic, around issue 47 (the run ended at issue 50). I was in college at this point, and a good friend, Mark Brager (who lived in Detroit and had access to direct sales specialty shops) recommended the comic to me. I was quickly hooked.

At this point in the long running Cerebus title, its creator, Dave Sim, had begun to divide the comic into novels, which would later be published in large collected editions resembling phone books. At the time that I started reading the series, there were no collected editions. My first real taste of the book came with the Church and State storyline collected in two volumes and consisting of issues 52-80 and 81-111 as well as the years of 1983-1988. Soon after I began reading Cerebus, the earliest issues, the sword and sorcery parodies, were collected as the Swords of Cerebus. I bought and read those issues (LOVED them), but I did not have the means to catch up on the High Society issues until Sim released issues 26-50 as the first collected volume in 1986.

I was hooked on Sim's creation from the beginning and quite enamored of this plan of his to write the life of his character in 300 issues. It seemed a huge and daunting task when he announced it in the 1980s. I cannot claim that I remained  as engaged by the stories, or by Sim himself, over the years. But I did read the ENTIRE run of the comic, even when Sim's own beliefs about gender, politics, religion, and many other things were not only unpleasant but downright offensive. (Though I do respect Sim's right to have and even proselytize those beliefs) After all, I am also a fan of Orson Scott Card, despite not agreeing with his views on sexuality. At least OSC keeps his views out of his fiction for the most part or is at least not quite as pedantic and insufferable about pandering these views as Sim became in the later years of the Cerebus novels. Though I did enjoy his essays on self-publishing, his published correspondence with Alan Moore, and his long diatribe essay on the religion of Islam, even though I disagreed with many of his ideas. Sim may be offensive, but he is an intellectual and a worthy opponent in an argument.

I tried Sim's follow up to Cerebus, a comic called Glamourpuss, but I quickly soured on Sim's heavy-handed treatment of his views on the world. Besides, the idea for the comic did not have the "legs" that the Cerebus idea had. I stopped buying it.

Criticisms of Dave Sim's views are very deftly handled on a blog called Upton Park by Andrew Rilstone, Gentleman.

I also quite like this essay on Cerebus by Andrew Hickey: "Cerebus is possibly the most daunting work in the whole history of art. This is not an exaggeration."

Still, I love the shirt. And the Church and State novel is definitely my favorite Cerebus book but also one of my favorite comic books of all time. It's one of the single best parodies on religion, especially Catholicism, ever written.

"At a time when the series was about 70% completed, celebrated comic book writer Alan Moore wrote, "Cerebus, as if I need to say so, is still to comic books what Hydrogen is to the Periodic Table'" ("Cerebus," Wikipedia, 2013).

So, I have included some great images here for your edification and amusement, including one of the best pages from the entire run of Church and State. Enjoy!!

And as always, thank you for reading my self-indulgent blog.

- chris tower 1304.14 12:00
Photo courtesy of Liesel MK Tower

T-shirt #23: Planet of the Snapes

T-shirt #23: Planet of the Snapes

Blame Facebook again. Those damn ads that target our "likes."

This time it was Teefury that pooped next to my news feed. (Yes, I know the text reads "pooped." I meant "popped," but in an edit, I saw that I had written "pooped" and liked it so much that I decided to leave it.)

The social media interwebs knew that I liked geeky stuff; however, there is no way it could have predicted this particular confluence of forces and the meaning for my family.

My step-daughter Piper's favorite character in the Harry Potter books is Severus Snape. Also, we have learned that her Dad and I share many interests, one of which is the Planet of the Apes films, which I was mad for back in the 1970s and still consider among my favorite cult phenomena.

So, enter Teefury, a web store that offers a daily T-shirt. The shirt goes on sale for 24 hours. Teefury blitzes social media, sells the shirt inexpensively, and then makes it exclusive by yanking it from the market. When I saw the "Planet of the Snapes" shirt, I knew Piper would want one. I wanted one. It was clever and amusing, and it combined two things we both loved. I ended up ordering one for my step-son Ivan, too. Now, we're a family united by "Planet of Snapes." (I would have ordered one for  Liesel if she wore more T-shirts or had read the Harry Potter books).

There's more to say about how Harry Potter saved my life and how the Planet of the Apes movies influenced  my ideas about story-telling, but those are stories for another time. This entry needs to remain short. I had to log a short one eventually. I had intended for all the posts to be short this week. And then they grew and grew. Today, I am making an effort to keep it short and sweet. Don't expect a book every day.

-chris tower - 1304.13
Photo courtesy of Liesel MK Tower

T-shirt #22: I miss FREAKANGELS

T-shirt #22: I miss FREAKANGELS

I miss FREAKANGELS. From February 15th, 2008 through August 5th 2011, with occasional skips in the schedule, Warren Ellis and Paul Duffield released a weekly episodic comic called FREAKANGELS with the publication aid of Avatar Press.

I love episodes. I LOVE the episodic narrative.

All diehard comic book fans also love the episodic narrative and are quite hooked on it. By "diehard," I mean fans who make the weekly trek to the local comic store, who have subscribed to a comics service and have comics shipped weekly, or who, these days, have subscribed to a digital service and have comics sent to their devices on a weekly basis.

Comics come out WEEKLY. Each week a set of new titles finds its way to the display racks in stores. Those of us who became hooked on comics before the direct sales, specialty comics shops became THE places to buy, remember knowing which day the comics were put out for sale and all the places where comics were sold. In those early days (when comics were 12 cents and then 15 cents... I am not so old that I bought comics for 10 cents or 5 cents), I bought my comics in liquor stores, drug stores, grocery stores, tobacco shops, book stores, and even some smart toy stores. Though most often, I bought my weekly comics in the grocery store accompanying my mother on the weekly grocery shopping trek. My allowance was based on this comics purchase: 25 cents, which bought me two comics plus tax. Unfortunately, there were more than two new titles published each week. But I made choices, and I bought many of my early titles this way, enjoying Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, The Incredible Hulk, Batman, the Justice League, the Flash, Hawkman, The Teen Titans, and The Legion of Superheroes.


DC Comics was the first to cash in on the episodic narrative in a bigger way. In 1991, DC consolidated its Superman titles into one story. Launching a third and fourth title, and marking each comic with triangle or shield, the Superman comics became one giant story with weekly episodes rather than the stand-alone one-shots or small story arcs exclusive to each title of the previous iteration. Though many hardcore comics fans loathed the collective, intertwining story, I loved it. Finally, instead of waiting four weeks in between issues, I was able to enjoy a new episode of the ongoing Superman story every week. Later, Marvel Comics caught on to this idea and organized the same rotation for its Spider-Man comics.

Weekly is where it's at!

The addiction to the episodic narrative is not exclusive to comics. Nightly TV shows began to understand the public's hunger for long, episodic narratives in weekly installments. Many shows from HBO's narratives to those on the main networks, like Fox, have used this format to great success. But even before nightly TV caught on that viewers had long attention spans that would last a whole season, Daytime TV had been using this format in soap operas, which provided DAILY installments of a huge, sprawling narrative. Awesome! One of these, The Young and the Restless, is celebrating its fortieth year of production. FORTY YEARS OF DAILY EPISODES. This is one of the biggest, most complex and yet reliable (turn it on at 12:30 every day and there it is) episodic narratives in existence in the entertainment media of today.

Back to FREAKANGELS. Warren Ellis (who is one of my favorite writers) conceived the idea of a weekly comic that would be released in installments via the web. Already using social media, such as Twitter, to bring people to his web site, Ellis began to promote FREAKANGELS. Every Friday, he would announce via Twitter (which would feed to his web site) when the new installment of FREAKANGELS went live. Even when the series had to skip a week, Ellis kept his readership informed about the reason for the skip and when the next episode was likely to hit the Internet. I was not the only reader resending his Twitter messages and posting FREAKANGELS links on my Facebook page and other Web 2.0 media, such as Tumblr.

Every Friday, I think about how FREAKANGELS is finished, and how much I miss it. I miss the six-page chunk of story every week. I miss the characters and being part of their lives for THREE YEARS.

Though he is no longer doing a weekly narrative, Ellis has launched a new episodic comic called Scatterlands, drawn by Jason Howard. He is releasing one panel a day on his web site, though as of the writing of this blog entry, after 25 episodes, the comic is currently on hiatus.

What is FREAKANGELS? Oh, did you notice that I wrote NOTHING about its story or characters? Well, I did that on purpose. Find out for yourself. The comics are still online here: FREAKANGELS. AND they have all been collected.

SIDE NOTE: Lately, I have been enjoying an episodic narrative in a new form: a weekly serial novel, The Human Division, written by John Scalzi, being released weekly for Kindle and other e-reader devices and running 13 episodes; the final one was released on Tuesday, April 9th, 2013. I don't have a a T-shirt for Scalzi's book, but you can learn more via his blog: WHATEVER; I linked this to a specific post about the book.

-chris tower
1304.12 - 8:45
Photo courtesy of Liesel MK Tower